kinds:they never stop changing,and terms that designate them constitute
only what Wittgenstein called “family resemblance predicates.”Nothing
guarantees that all the forms of human music contain a nucleus of
common properties that would be invariant since the origination of
music.
If music is not a unified and homogeneous reality,there is no reason
to imagine that it emerged one day wholly made by evolution.The only
legitimate approach (in the worst case an exercise in brain storming) is
to recognize that there is no “music in and of itself,”no musical essence,
but only some distinct capacities that one day converged toward what
we today call music.In addition,we have to place in perspective not only
the mixed and heterogeneous nature of music itself but also the exter-
nal relations that it maintains with what one could call the sister arts.I
use this expression in a broad sense to refer not only to poetry and paint-
ing but also to the entire family of the performing arts—theater,mime,
circus,dance—as well as to language.Contrary to common opinion,
language is no more natural than music;it constitutes a heterogeneous
reality.In a general manner,I believe that problems posed by the origins
of music as well as by the origins of language can be resolved in a proper
manner only by engaging in an exercise of systematic deconstruction of
these notions.To take up once again the expression of François Jacob,
evolution is a bricolage,and we have no reason to think that music and
language,two capacities of which we are so proud,could have escaped
this mode of production.
It is thus advisable to analyze music and language by reducing them
to their constitutive elements,of which one could make the hypothesis
that they correspond to independent modules,each of which has under-
gone a specific evolutionary trajectory.What are these features or con-
stituents of music? In an elementary fashion,one could distinguish a
temporal component consisting of meter and rhythm,and a melodic
component consisting of contour,pitch,and interval.An essential argu-
ment in favor of the existence of distinct modules for each of these fea-
tures is furnished by neuropsychology.
It must be pointed out first that the neuropsychology of music has
shown a pronounced lag by comparison with the current state of
knowledge of the neuropsychology of language.Even though aphasia
and its different forms have been topics of great interest for well over a
century—at least since the work of Broca and Wernicke—the study of
the corresponding deficits in the domain of music,that is to say,the
amusias,is still in its infancy.This seems significant to me:it shows that
music,as it is viewed as an elevated art form,is difficult to submit to
experimental scientific approaches.However,despite the insufficiency of
our understanding,the study of pathological dissociations and double169 Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Music and Language